Maybe I'll just have a quick poke around tonight. Nothing fancy or extended. Well, I definitely won't be shooting Sleepers, seeing that all our anomalies have been stolen, bastards. Perhaps one of the handful of new signatures will lead to the culprits. I dunno about that, but we've certainly had some visitors today, with two K162s from class 2 w-space and a K162 from class 5 w-space connecting to us.

I'll visit the systems in the order I found them, probably just poking my nose in for a superficial scouting. In to C2a first. My directional scanner shows me a tower and no ships, and the discovery scanner reveals, cripes, thirty-one anomalies and thirteen signatures. Do your own sites, arseholes. Is anything else out there? It's a pretty big system, end-to-end, but a waste of time in crossing it. Nothing more to see.

A blanket scan doesn't find any ships and there are no more on-line towers, leaving me to locate the active one for my notes and decide that I've finished here. I don't care to scan for the static exit to high-sec. If I get podded, so be it. Living w-space life on the edge tonight. No, hold on, one more activity before I leave: activate all the anomalies. Being a big system, giving all the warp commands, even when cancelled, kills my capacitor a couple of times. I hope the locals appreciate what I've done for them.

Home, and on to C2b, where d-scan shows me a tower and no ships again, but the system holds a more sensible eight anomalies and five signatures. You may keep them. I'm gracious that way. The tower is easy enough to locate, being around a planet with a single moon, despite other choices available. Just the one planet lurks outside of d-scan range, but warping over there finds nothing else of interest. I could launch probes and scan, but I think I'll just move on.

Or maybe I'll hang around, when finally warping to the tower in C2b pulls me in to range of not only a second and third tower, but also a whole bunch of ships. I forgot that a couple of planets in the middle of the system were slightly out of range. D-scan now shows me a Viator transport, Thrasher destroyer, Noctis salvage, Purifier stealth bomber, Magnate frigate, Bestower hauler, Basilisk logistics ship, Atron frigate, and Anathema covert operations boat. That's some coincidence that one tower was only just in range of the wormhole and holds none of the ships.

Finding the ships sees the Magnate and Bestower at one tower, the hauler piloted, and the rest of the ships at the other tower, all empty. Maybe I can watch the Bestower for a bit. Or maybe I can warp away and launch probes, in case the Bestower moves to a wormhole I don't yet know about. Okay, I launch probes, warp back to the tower to watch the Bestower, then warp to the actual tower where the Bestower is and not the one with no ships. Either way, I start watching an idle hauler.

I think this Bestower really is idle. I'm almost certainly wasting my time watching it. I'll make a quick scan for wormholes, then hit the C5. Aww, dammit, my first scan picks up two wormholes and an industrial ship. I ignored all known ships from the results, so this one is new to the system, will be piloted, and has probably seen my probes. That's bad timing.

Updating d-scan sees the Mammoth hauler, and a finer d-scan puts him at the third tower. Did he just come back from high-sec, or is he newly on-line? I can't tell, but I watch him do nothing instead of the Bestower. Okay, back to scanning. I started, so I'll finish, and put the kibosh on the Mammoth wanting to do anything. Two wormholes and, bloody hell, a new ship, a second Bestower! Bad timing. He warps to the tower with the Mammoth, although it looks like he actually replaces the Mammoth. One blinks off-line as the other appears, and the pilots look to be related.

More industrial ships appear from nowhere. An Epithal hauler first, followed by a second Epithal. Well, if they're going to be like that, I'll pop home for a minute. I'm not letting another ship get away from me because of some stupid design. A quick refit and I'm back watching a hauler do nothing, whether it's a Bestower, Epithal, or Epithal, Bestower. Whatever. One of the Epithals finally starts to move, and I lose my eyeline as soon as it does, 'look at' not being an entirely descriptive action this time. That's frustrating.

I see where the Epithal goes, but late, and it takes me valuable seconds to get in to warp to follow. I'm aiming for the customs office, hoping the Epithal went there too, not quite sure if there is also a tower out by that planet. I'm a little disorientated. But there he is, scooping goo from the customs office, if a little far from me at the moment. I'll take what I can get, though, and decloak, activate my sensor booster, and burn towards my target.

The Epithal's already turning by the time my Loki strategic cruiser appears, and in the few seconds it takes for my recalibration delay from decloaking to dissipate the hauler is accelerating in to warp. I don't even manage to get a positive lock. I'm just left floating in empty space. I could have caught him if I hadn't lost tracking when he initiated warp. I hope that was a glitch and not changed behaviour, or I'll never catch another gooer. Well, whatever, the Epithal returns to his tower and goes off-line. I'll cut my losses and do the same, particularly as this was meant to be a quick session. It's not been a terribly successful evening.

2 Responses to “Losing my eyeline”

I don't know if it's a change or a bug but the look at seems to break these days for me when someone engages warp and the tracking camera doesn't seem to track when it snaps back. Makes tracking the fast warping ships like covops pretty much impossible by sight.

I've gotten into the habit of looking at the sun and figuring out left to right what planet is what then warping based on that via the right click menu. Seems to be the only reliable way to guarantee what planet they go to visually and not get mixed up by the new tooltips stacking up oddly with the nearby planets.